Koalas, Kangaroos, and Wallabies- Caversham Wildlife Park

Today we visited the Caversham Wildlife Park. We took about an hour bus ride there and split into 3 groups, each with a zoo tour guide. First up were the koalas. They were so cute! We were lucky to spot a few with their eyes open and one moving around because they spend the majority of their day sleeping. We were able to gently pet their backs and they were so soft! Also, the keepers rotate them and give them time alone so they don’t have to interact with visitors too much, which is good.

Petting a soft, sleeping koala.

Next we went to the Kangaroo enclosure, the part I was most excited for. There was a bucket of feed for the kangaroos, but they were so tame that you could pretty much just walk right up to them and pet them. They were really soft too, and really lazy in the heat and sun. A lot of them had joeys sticking out of their pouch- it was weird when all you could see were long legs sticking out of the mom’s stomach!

Me with a small white kangaroo.

I loved this one- she was one of the bigger ones in the enclosure.

A mum with a big joey. If you look closely at the baby's toes you can see that they have two small side ones, and one large middle toe. Very strange looking!

The zookeeper told us that many of the kangaroos that interact with the visitors are either juveniles or females because adult males can get up to seven feet tall. Here she is with her orphaned joey, Daniel. She takes him home every night to give him milk and he sleeps in a pillowcase.

Here’s the groups with Big Bubs, a female wallaby. I did not think this is what they looked like- they are adorable! They look like a giant stuffed animal/pillow. Jesse (the keeper) told us they can run up to 40 km/hr…which is about 25 mph. I don’t know HOW that is possible…maybe they can roll that fast? J

That’s another thing that’s hard to get used to here- the conversions. Everyone always tells us the temperature in Celsius and the road signs are all in kilometers, etc.

After our tour of the park we went out and had yet another sausage sizzle, complete with veggie sausages like always. Soda is pretty different here too…I got a Kirk’s “Creaming Soda” expecting it to be cream soda, and opened it up to find fluorescent pink, gross candy flavored soda. Kirk’s also has Passion Fruit flavor, which tastes like cough syrup. The lemon squash kind isn’t so bad. "Lemon Squash" is like lemonade while "Lemonade" labeled soda is more like sprite here. There are always tons of varieties of lemonade at the sausage sizzles.

Slang:

Arvo- afternoon (“good arvo”)

Footy- Aussie Rules football

Thongs- flipflops

Sun Cream- sunscreen